Once a year, in early summer, the school’s hall would be laid-out with desks - carefully spaced-out and upon which mysterious and rather sinister-looking papers would sit face-down next to a solitary pencil. On each desk would be the name of the ‘candidate’ to sit the eleven-plus examination which would determine which pupils would go to the local Grammar school, and by implication, which pupils wouldn’t. The stakes were high; a position at the prestigious Westeven Grammar School, where students would not only have the privilege of studying for the General Certificate of Education (a passport to later success and access to further education if Gerry’s teachers were to be believed) but would also have the dubious pleasure of learning to parse Latin verbs and to play Rugby Union football; or a place at the local secondary-modern Robert Patterson School, where students could go through the motions of academic study, resulting in a Certificate of Secondary Education which might serve to obtain them a craft apprenticeship - providing they also mastered elementary woodworking or metalworking skills, didn’t turn into juvenile delinquents and knew how to doff their caps at their betters who would inevitably graduate from the school on the opposite side of the road (if Gerry‘s teachers were to be believed at all).
Gerry’s elder brother Glenn had not only passed the examination stage of this much-vaunted streamed education, but he had also succeeded in ‘making the right impression’ at the interview and had received his letter of admission, the cause of great celebration in the Hood household that summer. Passing the examination did not guarantee admission and Gerry and Glenn’s cousin David had failed to ‘scrub-up’ sufficiently at his interview and had thereby been consigned to a secondary-modern with a fearful reputation for spawning the local dregs of humanity for failing some secret, esoteric set of codes. But no-one was granted an interview without a pass and so for two years running (some, but not all children were given early examination entrance and therefore two opportunities to succeed.) Gerry sat down with the mystifying papers and tried not to panic at the importance of its outcome.
He didn’t mind the English paper too much, requiring, as it did, a knowledge of composition and comprehension. He could do both easily. But the mathematics and logical reasoning part caused him anxiety, particularly were it to contain nothing but long-division sums. In the event he recalled to his father that it mainly consisted of mental-arithmetic and reasoning, “you know dad, if one man climbs to the top of a tower and is able to see twenty-six miles, how far can two men see?” he joked easily with him. Gerry was a little surprised at the ease with which he completed the questions, easily spotting those designed to trick children out of a better education, and after carefully checking his answers and one alteration he was a little concerned to have almost an hour left to wait whilst the ‘plodders’ chewed on their HB pencils and shuffled uneasily in their chairs whilst anxiously fantasising about ‘big-kids’ who bit, punched, stole and bullied their way through the ranks of the first-years they were about to become. Secondary school loomed large and Gerry was about to take a decisive step and cross the rubicon into one or other of these elitist systems.
The letter, when it eventually arrived, announced that not only had Gerry passed the examination but he had been selected for a place at either the local grammar school or as a boarder at the even more prestigious King’s Grammar School some 25 miles distant from his home - though his parents decided not to tell him about that option, something he only discovered thirty years later when his mother finally relinquished her iron grip on what remained of his educational records. He and his brother would be re-united at Westeven Grammar School, and the family were doubly proud because his cousin Drew had failed to make the cut and therefore the Hood’s boys would single-handedly lead the family out of the dark void of educational oblivion. Well, one would have thought so, but Gerry knew perfectly well that both his cousins were he and his brother’s intellectual equals at least, but even in the days before post-codes, Gerry sensed that the difference in their respective addresses had made no small influence on this outcome.
Gerry was pleased to learn that Ralph Ireland-West would also be joining him at grammar school, along with the ‘swots’ who were to later populate the accountants and lawyers of the land to which he now had one foot-in-the-door having passed his ‘scholarship’. He didn’t know how this might have redeemed his previous transgressions but he had a very strange and discomforting moment in Mr. Lowday’s office when in a spontaneous outpouring of pride the head had made to put his arm around the boys shoulder in congratulation and Gerry had almost passed-out with fear of another ‘good’ shaking. In the event he had passed-out with honours but Gerry felt little pride and no gratitude to the surly ape who now wanted to claim and count Gerry’s success as his own. Gerry did feel grateful to Mr. Dodd whose calm, fair and yet firm tutelage had undoubtedly undone some of the damage inflicted by the Grinters and Lowdays of his education and he shook hands enthusiastically with all the children who had achieved their ‘potential’, a word that would continue to return as a theme when Gerry did begin his time as a pupil at Westeven Grammar.
Whilst the swots continued their ‘cotton-wool’ versions of cricket, tennis and football, mimes of the real thing without any form of physical contact, hard-balls or aggression, Gerry and Ralph embarked on a final scandalous reign of naughtiness. This took the very anti-social form of spitting at people on their high-speed race home from school riding their new geared bicycles - the reward for their achievements. Ralph was something of an innovator of this adrenaline-fuelled pastime which involved randomly selecting a distant victim and liberally coating them with one’s saliva, delivered in a high-velocity missile with stunning accuracy. The excitement of the game derived not only from the victim’s discomfort and disgust at having been so horribly assailed but in the perpetrators knowledge that the game would be acted-out again the following evening when rancorous victims would assemble to gain revenge but the two boys, themselves fearful of reprisals, would demonstrate speed and agility beyond their foes and, in the best of all possible outcomes, leave their victims once again befouled with their ‘gob’! It was a dangerous business and would lead to bitter enmity before retribution was to be had by the countless victims of this foul and puerile debacle.
The end arrived mercifully in the unexpected form of a girl from the much maligned secondary-modern, who incensed by a previous attack lay in wait and brought Ralph down by hefting her satchel-full of books into his hurtling midriff. Before the wounded boy could recover his feet she leapt upon him, pulling his jumper up over his head and, whilst he was thus incapacitated, beat him ferociously with her fists until the sounds of a sobbing and recalcitrant Ralph were heeded by several adults who had previously watched with shared satisfaction. Gerry looked on in horror but made no attempt to escape this summary justice, although no-one attacked him though he was equally deserving of the same treatment, he knew that much. Somehow Ralph’s leadership and manic enthusiasm for this doomed game had earned him an unfair share of the blame, and when they next convened his wounded pride now possessed an element of coolness toward Gerry who had witnessed his spectacular humiliation from too close a distance. They took another route home after that which involved throwing stones through greenhouse glass and spitting at passing cars, an art that was thoroughly eclipsed by one of Gerry’s new friends, Russell Biggs, who had the unusual ability to able to projectile vomit at will. Russell was a little more discriminating in his targets, choosing only to garnish the bonnets of vehicles of ‘prefects’ at his secondary school who had committed petty injustices against him. It was, it turned-out, a very effective deterrent, only once challenged by the bullying head-boy who having rounded Russell up for his heinous crime of puking on the windscreen of his Vauxhall Viva, soon released him from the headlock he held him in when Russell’s breakfast began oozing down the legs of his new Levi Strauss denims.
Chastened by the good-hiding his erstwhile friend had received, Gerry made a new friend in an unlikely way. The Palin family had recently arrived in the school and were quickly the victims themselves of discrimination. There were several of them, they spoke with Scottish accents and their clothes were less than elegant. When Gerry was heard by the kindly Mr. Dodd to refer to one of them as “scruffy” he was upbraided by his teacher. The non-appearance of the boy the following day, who was apparently very upset by this incident, occasioned Mr. Dodd to insist that Gerry went to the Palin’s household and made good his personal apology. This was no small thing to do. Gerry recalled standing nervously at the door of the Palin family household as inside the noise of barking dogs threatened to drown out the screams of adults and shrieks of children. He rang the doorbell with his trembling hand and it was immediately opened by Ma Palin, a woman of enormous dimensions with however a kindly smile.
“Hello duck, what can I do for you?” she enquired smilingly as dogs rushed to sniff the new flesh on the doorstep.
“I’ve come to apologise!” blurted out Gerry.
“Oh, you’d better come in then. Now what was it you wanted to apologise for?” she said.
“I said something nasty to your son Christopher” said Gerry, but before he could continue the large lady shrieked “CHRISTOPHER!” and the offended boy appeared smiling at the top of the stairway.
The commotion of the dogs and the new arrival had by now attracted the attention of the entire household who peered out of doorways and across bannisters at the intimidated Gerry.
“I’m sorry” he croaked and with that Mrs. Palin was ushering everyone else away and asking
“Would you like a cup of tea duck?”
The house was like no other house that Gerry had ever seen. It was full of people, animals, dinner-plates and parts of engines in their stripped-down form. There were no carpets - aside from a mat of matted of dog-hairs - only rudimentary furnishings, but it was full of life and joy. Christopher had apparently accepted Gerry’s apology in an instant and so the two boys settled down amidst the mayhem and began their friendship with great ease.
There seemed to Gerry to be several generations in the Palin household. There were mysterious older sisters who would occasionally appear but who lived now with boyfriends in other parts of the city. There were two older brothers. Ronald and Colin, whose passion for motorcycles saw them permanently assembling or stripping down their machines in the outside shed from which they would occasionally emerge and roar off with their biker friends to unknown destinations. There was Chris and his nearest sibling Gary, both possessed of great wit and imagination. And there were two younger sisters with whom they fought endless disputes for their share of the overcrowded territory. It was a big house where space was at a premium, but Mrs. Palin presided over it all with a calm grace and kindliness, the like of which Gerry had not seen before. He loved it round at 36 Halesworth Crescent and began to spend all of his spare time with the family - the father of whom would re-appear one week in four but who would seldom be seen in the household as he would be off working in some distant and remote place, the names of which Gerry would not recognise but learned were all somewhere ‘in the gulf’. And there were the two friendliest mongrel dogs that Gerry had ever known who loafed around the house, living off scraps and leftovers and leaving a trail of ginger hair on everything they came into contact with. Like faithful and playful hounds themselves, the boys’ new friendship would bring both pleasure and sadness as the new ‘brothers’ explored the bond which would lead them ever deeper into previously unexplored territory and until their individual destinies took separate paths.
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